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by Ancalagon 16 days ago
How is custom engineering the tooling from scratch for every task the best path forward? There will always be some engineered tools that are better than others even when re-made by the same models - not to mention the cost of starting from scratch every single time just seems wasteful with current token spend.

Does "don't re-invent the wheel" not apply to agents for some reason?

4 comments

> Does "don't re-invent the wheel" not apply to agents for some reason?

Correct, the purpose of agents is to become the ultimate wheel so we humans can stop needing to reinvent the wheel. For it to do that it needs to know how to reinvent wheels.

And, just to be clear, "don't re-invent the wheel" is just for small teams, as a whole humanity needs to re-invent the wheel all the time to adapt to new situations. For every wheel your team shouldn't reinvent some other teams main job is to reinvent that wheel.

Humans (exhibiting "general intelligence") are tool builders; virtually all our capabilities stem from our ability to create and use tools - often extremely specialized to a task. Why would an artificial general intelligence be any different?
"don't reinvent the wheel" isn't a law of physics and I think is mostly said by people that never designed anything with wheels.
Bespoke tools can be simpler than general purpose ones